low-energy games are my crack cocaine. when i’m dead tired and have no willpower but still want to distract myself, i know <insert MMO here>¹ has my back.

i feel like these games peel back the curtain and are more honest than many others because they don’t pretend to be anything other than a skinner box. do you want to enjoy a story for nine hours; or, get to the good part and zone out for eternity?

it’s like looking at a slot machine; there aren’t any delusions about “winning it big” or “having fun”. chronic machine gamblers will tell you they gamble purely to get into the zone and enter a state of flow² and the manufacterers likewise engineer their machines to be maximally addicting in order to increase time-on-device.

This image from the book has stuck with me ever since I read it. It’s a drawing made by a gambler showing the loop of her entire life.

"The road she drew features no exits, appearing instead as a closed circuit of stations where various vices—as well as their remedies—may be pursued. Inside this circuit (or perhaps outside, it was not clear) her figure floated, anchored only to a gambling machine. “Where is that?” I asked when she had completed the sketch, pointing at the human-machine pair in the middle of the page. “That’s nowhere,” she responded; “that’s the zone.”²

anyways i wrote all of this because today i spent like 4 hours clicking rocks in runescape.

~1: Runescape, POE2, PokeMMO, FF14, BDO, etc.~

~2: Chapter 1, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas~